Louisiana's "Medically Futile" Unborn Child List: Ethical Lessons at the Post-Dobbs Intersection of Reproductive and Disability Justice.

Ableist attitudes and structures are increasingly recognized across all sectors of health care delivery. After Dobbs, novel questions arose in the United States concerning how to protect reproductive autonomy while avoiding discrimination against and devaluation of disabled persons. In this essay, we examine the Louisiana Department of Health's emergency declaration, "List of Conditions That Shall Deem an Unborn Child 'Medically Futile,'" issued August 1, 2022.

Expanding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to Disability: Opportunities for Biological Psychiatry.

Given its subject matter, biological psychiatry is uniquely poised to lead STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives related to disability. Drawing on literatures in science, philosophy, psychiatry, and disability studies, we outline how that leadership might be undertaken. We first review existing opportunities for the advancement of DEI in biological psychiatry around axes of gender and race.

Against Personal Ventilator Reallocation.

The COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease of 2019) pandemic has led to intense conversations about ventilator allocation and reallocation during a crisis standard of care. Multiple voices in the media and multiple state guidelines mention reallocation as a possibility. Drawing upon a range of neuroscientific, phenomenological, ethical, and sociopolitical considerations, the authors argue that taking away someone's personal ventilator is a direct assault on their bodily and social integrity.

Moving through capacity space: mapping disability and enhancement.

In this paper, we highlight some problems for accounts of disability and enhancement that have not been sufficiently addressed in the literature. The reason, we contend, is that contemporary debates that seek to define, characterise or explain the normative valence of disability and enhancement do not pay sufficient attention to (1) a wide range of cases, and (2) the transition between one state and another. In section one, we provide seven cases that might count as disability or enhancement.

Health for Whom? Bioethics and the Challenge of Justice for Genomic Medicine.

The guiding premise from which this special report begins is the conviction and hope that justice is at the normative heart of medicine and that it is the perpetual task of bioethics to bring concerns of justice to bear on medical practice. On such an account, justice is medicine's lifeblood, that by which it contributes to life as opposed to diminishing it. It is in this larger, historical, intersectional, critical, and ethically minded context that we must approach pressing questions facing medicine, including the question of the import and role of genomic knowledge for human life.

Disability Rights as a Necessary Framework for Crisis Standards of Care and the Future of Health Care.

In this essay, we suggest practical ways to shift the framing of crisis standards of care toward disability justice. We elaborate on the vision statement provided in the 2010 Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) "Summary of Guidance for Establishing Crisis Standards of Care for Use in Disaster Situations," which emphasizes fairness; equitable processes; community and provider engagement, education, and communication; and the rule of law. We argue that interpreting these elements through disability justice entails a commitment to both distributive and recognitive justice.

The Harm of Ableism: Medical Error and Epistemic Injustice.

This paper argues that epistemic errors rooted in group- or identity-based biases, especially those pertaining to disability, are undertheorized in the literature on medical error. After sketching dominant taxonomies of medical error, we turn to the field of social epistemology to understand the role that epistemic schemas play in contributing to medical errors that disproportionately affect patients from marginalized social groups. We examine the effects of this unequal distribution through a detailed case study of ableism.

Three Things Clinicians Should Know About Disability.

The historical relationship between health care professionals and people with disabilities is fraught, a fact all the more troubling in light of the distinctive roles clinicians play in both establishing and responding to that which is considered normal or abnormal by society at large. Those who wish to improve their clinical practice might struggle, however, to keep up with developments across numerous disability communities as well as the ever-growing body of disability studies scholarship. To assist with this goal, I offer an overview of recent disability theory, outline a set of responsibilities clinicians have to disability communities, and provide recommendations for clinicians who hope to justly treat patients with disabilities and improve their care and health outcomes.

The Extended Body: On Aging, Disability, and Well-being.

Insofar as many older adults fit some definition of disability, disability studies and gerontology would seem to have common interests and goals. However, there has been little discussion between these fields. The aim of this paper is to open up the insights of disability studies as well as philosophy of disability to discussions in gerontology.

Renewing Medicine's basic concepts: on ambiguity.

Background: Edmund Pellegrino lamented that the cultural climate of the industrialized West had called the fundamental means and ends of medicine into question, leading him to propose a renewed reflection on medicine's basic concepts, including health, disease, and illness. My aim in this paper is take up Pellegrino's call. I argue that in order to usher in this renewal, the concept of ambiguity should take on a guiding role in medical practice, both scientific and clinical.

Bioethics as care work.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that humans are defined by care. The term he used, "Sorge," picks out a wide range of caring relations, including sorrow, worry, the making of arrangements, and even fending for another. Since coming to The Hastings Center, I've been struck by the genuine care definitive of its scholars' relationship to their work.

Being Better Bodies.

Bioethics has an uneasy relationship with embodiment. Only with vigilance does knowledge of the body as it is lived counterbalance the momentous inertia of knowledge of the body as an object brought about by modern medical sciences. As a field tethered to detached, technical ways of knowing the world, bioethics must toil to treat the body as more than mere material and machine.